The Renaissance, 1300-1600
MIT OpenCourseWare offers this history course tracing the Renaissance as a set of responses to humanism, the intellectual movement that began in fourteenth-century Italy and reshaped literature, art, science, religion, and government over three centuries. Lectures move beyond the familiar art-history version of the period to cover religious reformations, high politics, the agrarian economy, and European conquest and expansion abroad. Materials include a syllabus, lecture outlines, and reading assignments drawn from primary sources and scholarly interpretations of figures like Petrarch and the currents of civic humanism in Florence and beyond. The course is free to audit through MIT OCW, with no certificate offered, following MIT's standard format of posted lecture notes and assignments rather than video lectures. It suits students who want a structured, reading-heavy introduction to how humanist ideas filtered into politics and society across early modern Europe.